How To Move a Lighthouse

This lighthouse, on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, was in danger of falling into the ocean. To save it, a group of men battled the forces of weather, mass, and the mightiest, most imperceptible force of all: time.

One bright, cool day in the spring of 2010, Richard Skidmore walked up a small dirt path that runs along the bluffs in front of the Gay Head Lighthouse on Martha's Vineyard. The lighthouse had stood on the promontory since 1856. Skidmore, the lighthouse keeper, with his wife, Joanie, could walk this path blindfolded, its soft rise from the street toward the cliffs, a north-northwest approach. Each step added to the view of Vineyard Sound, the Elizabeth Islands beyond, and Buzzards Bay in the distance. Richard didn't live at the lighthouse, the way keepers did in the old days, but he tended it and maintained it and visited every few days. In fact, he had been up at the light just two days before, and everything was as it should be. But now, something was different. There was a split-rail wood fence that ran along the bluffs, a fence Richard had known for the twenty years he had been the keeper of Gay Head Light—the fence was part of his life. As he rose to the top of the path, he stopped abruptly and stared at the fence, or the place where the fence should be. Forty feet of it was gone. He walked over to the bluffs, looked down. The fence was strung like a necklace on the face of the cliffs, dangling beneath the proud lighthouse toward the waves crashing silently into the rocks far below.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"A hundred years from now, maybe moving a lighthouse is no big deal," said Len. "You just put it through a matrix, vroop! We transport it."

Five Years Later

On May 28, 2015, the promontory on which the Gay Head Lighthouse sat vibrated with activity. People from all over the island—some tourists, a few reporters, but mostly hardened locals who'd been following the story and had heard that the old lighthouse that was falling into the ocean was actually going to be picked up and moved today—leaned on the barrier that kept them away from the construction.

The moving of the light was major news in Aquinnah, the town that includes Gay Head. After he found the dangling fence, Richard had enlisted engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to examine the structure. He fielded proposals for solutions and read up on a company called the International Chimney Corporation, which had moved numerous lighthouses, including the famous one at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. In 2012, two years after finding the fence, Richard stood before the town's board of selectmen and told them that the lighthouse had to be moved in 2015 to stay ahead of the erosion, that International Chimney was the outfit to do it, and that it was going to cost $3 million.

Erosion is one of nature's slowest phenomena, and its slow pace makes it hard to comprehend even when its effects are obvious, because it is only obvious if you didn't see it happening. Even if you sat watching a beach for thirty years, during which fifty feet of it eroded into the sea, you probably wouldn't notice the difference. Erosion takes forever, and yet we humans are constantly scrambling to combat its effects, the same way we don't believe our own bodies will age until after the wrinkles and aches set in.

T.M. Detwiler

Workers prowled the upper edges of a large trough that now surrounded the light like a moat of air. They examined the steel skids on which the lighthouse would travel the 129 feet to its new home, adding shims and checking levels. Jerry Matyiko, whose family owns Expert House Movers—a structural relocation company brought in by International Chimney—climbed into a Case 1155E bulldozer, its front end modified for hoisting. Jerry is a former Navy man, near seventy now. He's grown into a paunch and full beard but still has Popeye forearms. He wears a bandanna and clenches a cigar in his teeth. Jerry is the boss.

Two months before, crews had dug the trough around the lighthouse in a matter of weeks. They had peeled off the top layer of dirt and vegetation like a sticker, and restuck it several hundred yards away for safekeeping. Then they scraped off the next layer of earth, carefully sifted through it, and found bits of previous lives—a former lighthouse keeper's clay pipe, ceramic dishes that could have dated to the 1600s, when the native Wampanoag people lived there. After that, they dug past the two granite rings that formed the light's foundation, which over time had settled below ground level. They dug another six feet below that. As the space opened up around the lighthouse and its pedestal of red clay, it came to be a lone turret protruding from the deep. The trough looked as if it had been cut by water—158 feet long, the width of a four-car garage, with a wall at the cliff-side end like the scarp cut into shore by the farthest reaches of high tide.

"It's like sex," said Jerry. "If it doesn't stay up, you're in trouble."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

By the second week of May, steel beams had arrived in Aquinnah. Jerry's team from Expert House Movers began tunneling through the clay pedestal and threading beams through it. The clay supporting the lighthouse was slowly exchanged for a lattice of steel, forty-foot-long beams running across the width of the trough, supported on thirty-three-foot-long bright-yellow beams in the direction of its length. Box cribs—like little log cabins made of four-foot railroad ties—were erected under the beams. Soon, the lighthouse seemed to float above the ground, the giant granite blocks of its foundation high enough for a man to walk underneath, head high.

At the same time, a new concrete foundation was poured at the inland end of the trough. Its top was precisely level with the light's old foundation. A railway was constructed between them: A pair of fifty-foot beams were laid under the lighthouse, directly below the yellow main carrying beams, pointing toward the new foundation. Another pair was bolted to their ends, creating a hundred feet of track. Hilman rollers—tank-like sets of rolling steel cylinders—would be fixed to the underside of the yellow beams, providing wheels for what, it was becoming clear, was a kind of flatbed railcar.

By the end of the month, the small, historic lighthouse seemed a hulking monolith, brick on granite foundation on a railroad of steel beams on top of hard earth. Its structure had been fortified: doorways and open windows bricked up with concrete masonry units. A compression collar wrapped its upper reaches like a weight lifter's belt. Two massive beams through the bottom supported the center column that hangs the light's spiral staircase.

The tourists and the reporters and the locals watched as Jerry finished up in the dozer. When he came over to talk, they shouted out questions.

"When will it start rolling?"

"Shortly," said Jerry.

In the background, off to the side of the lighthouse, was a bright-yellow truck crawling with tendrils of black hose. Its back was a grid of gauges, valve handles, and levers.

"Is there any chance you guys are going to press those levers today?" someone asked.

"It'll be soon," said Jerry.

"Like while we're standing here?"

Jerry looked up and said, "How long are you gonna stand there?"

A worker looks up at the lighthouse mid-move

Ed Keating

The Lighthouse was supposed to be moved by Memorial Day, 2015, to be open for the summer tourist season. But in February, as a monstrous New England winter rendered the ground too hard to start digging, in lieu of the excavation a series of wooden stakes surrounded the lighthouse, marking the perimeter of the trough they would eventually dig. From up in the light, you could see the outline, the stakes forming a rectangle with rounded corners.

Four men stood in the lantern room, thawing in the heat of the double-barrel revolving light that cast the lighthouse's characteristic white-red, white-red, white-red.

"See where you can see the mainland, between those islands? That's New Bedford. At one time the richest city in the country."

"You know, back before they built the Cape Cod Canal, ninety thousand ships a year passed through the Vineyard Sound."

"That's up ten thousand from the last time I heard you talk about it."

"You know they used to call this the women's light? Can you guess why?"

"Why?"

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"Well, the light pattern used to be white-white-white-red. Think about the calendar."

"Ah."

"Weeks of the month."

"Heh heh."

"Sailors weren't so politically correct."

Adam Wilson, Aquinnah town administrator, and George Sourati, a civil engineer on the island who helped plan the move, seem the likely authorities. But they mostly sit back and listen as Richard Skidmore and Len Butler steer the conversation. It's hard not to. Richard is the veteran keeper, and Len is the guy who took charge of Aquinnah's Relocation Committee. As a general contractor, he had the expertise and interest to shepherd the move. They look like a comedy team at sunset, Richard and Len. Both in their sixties, Richard is tall and angular, Len short and weathered like the islander he has come to be. They're both Martha's Vineyard polymaths, guys who have mastered the various skills required to live on an island full time (an island with a year-round population of seventeen thousand and six towns, and where the Obamas and the Clintons vacation, but an island nonetheless). Not the physical skills—though they have those, too—but skills of a more valuable kind: reading the weather, knowing the neighbors, memorizing the best ways on and off the island at any given time of year. They've ingested the Vineyard's history and geology and can spit it out as if they've lived there their entire lives. Listen to them long enough and they tack hard into a long-running conversation about it. A routine.

Len: "I moved here when I was twenty-one, and I'm sixty-six now."

Richard: "Shit."

Len: "I've lived with that light forty-five years. I've gone to bed every night seeing it sweep through my bedroom window."

Richard: "If it's a cloudy night, it just lights up the sky in a cylindrical fifteen-second thing."

Len: "The arc of it washes the whole town."

"Sailors weren't so politically correct."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Aquinnah, at the western extreme of the Vineyard, is what the locals call up-island. Historically, it's been rural and undeveloped; a previous lighthouse keeper lost five kids in eleven years, in part because the lighthouse was a day's ride from the nearest doctor. But Gay Head was the site of the first lighthouse on the island because of an underwater rock formation called Devil's Bridge, just offshore, that scuttled ships traversing Vineyard Sound, between the island and the curling bicep of Cape Cod. It was a key shipping route at a time when towns from that part of Massachusetts accounted for nearly half the world's whaling and more than half the value of the American catch.

The first lighthouse at Gay Head, a squat wooden octagon, sprouted in 1799, built with funds procured by Alexander Hamilton himself. It was forty-seven feet tall and glowed with sperm whale oil. A contractor moved it seventy-five feet in 1844, to the present lighthouse location. (The current one was completed in 1856.) Today the light is still an active navigational beacon. So though it will move, it has to stay near the edge. It must sit at the same height. Mariners will update their charts and it will be 8.4 seconds east and 0.4 seconds south of its previous location.

Richard: "Even for landlubbers, Len, when he comes, and if I come home at night, at some point, I'm going to see the flash of that light and think, yeah—"

Len: "I'm home."

Push jacks, or rams, telescope out, pushing the beams on which the lighthouse sits.

Ed Keating

While crises occur only when we have built something that can be threatened, the problem of erosion dates back to before the creation of the island itself: 144,000 years ago the Illinoian glaciation pushed ice down North America. And 120,000 years later, the Wisconsinan glaciation did the same. The weight and motion of ice from the glaciers plowed up an edge of land called a moraine, and topped it with till. That is Martha's Vineyard: The island is a pile of rocks. Gay Head is so named because of the unending sculpting of the loose and colorful alliance of white Cretaceous and green Miocene sands, light-brown Quaternary sediments, and red Cretaceous clay that make up the bluffs. The string of landmarks from Martha's Vineyard down to Montauk, on Long Island, is pocked with proud maritime villages but also severe coastal erosion, because the moraine, essentially, is the crusty lip of snow, dirt, and garbage raised at the edge of a road by a snowplow. And the Atlantic won't stop. "When you're dealing with the sea—the sea wins," says Joe Jakubik, head of International Chimney's historic preservation division. "Doesn't matter what the situation is. Water wins."

Byron Stone is a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, and his job is to know the Massachusetts coast blind. He's well aware of lighthouse moves in his backyard. The two companies that moved Highland Light—International Chimney and Expert House Movers—moved the Southeast Lighthouse on Block Island in 1993. And the Nauset Lighthouse in Eastham, also on the Outer Cape, in 1996. And the Sankaty Head Lighthouse in Nantucket in 2007. "There's no cement between the grains," says Stone of the land beneath most of these places. "It's loose sand. You could stick your finger in. You could stick your little finger in. You could stick your tongue in it."

Stone helped choose the new location for the Gay Head Light. The goal was to deposit it someplace where it would be safe for at least a hundred years, when perhaps other men will stand in its shadow and try to figure out how to move it. Sea levels rise, climates change, erosion, accretion—these forces move so slowly as to seem unmoving to time-bound humans, until the moment that one is engulfed in a hurricane or drought, or one finds a lighthouse on the edge of a cliff.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Looking at the bluffs from offshore, the most extensive point of land is a red-clay promontory, with white sandy receding faces on both sides. A geotechnical consultant took core samples of the soil all over Gay Head. Stone helped review them. The vein of clay, which continues inland, proved to be steadfast against water. In a hundred years, perhaps it will be a red buttress between brick, candle, and sea.

"That's three mortgages," said Stone.

"A hundred years gets it safely out of our purview," said Richard.

"A hundred years from now, maybe moving a lighthouse is no big deal," said Len. "You just put it through a matrix, vroop! We transport it."

The light's spiral staircase, seen from below

Ed Keating

On the morning the lighthouse was scheduled to move, Richard and Len entertained a group of second- and third-graders from Chilmark, the next town. They came armed with questions.

"How tall is the lighthouse?"

"Fifty-two feet."

"How much does it weigh?"

"Four hundred tons."

"How far is it moving?"

"A hundred and twenty-nine feet."

Then a little squirt in Red Sox gear asked, "In the future, do you think you'll, like, have to move the lighthouse again?"

A few hours later, Jerry had everything perfect, beams in place, rails level, lighthouse secure. He climbed into the cab of the yellow truck. He looked like every driver of every box truck ever. But when he turned the key, something different happened. Fuel. Air. Spark. The percussion of internal combustion. Hydraulic fluid began coursing through the tendrils of hose, and somebody yelled, "It's moving!"

Jerry had sixteen jacks rigged up under the light, in a triangle: groups of five on the left and right and a group of six in the front. When the lighthouse was being lifted onto jack support, all sixteen were linked in a system called unified jacking, forcing them to rise together, at the same rate—slowly. During the move, Jerry would decouple the three zones. They defined the plane the lighthouse sat on. Any point of the triangle could be adjusted to keep it level.

"It's like a Greek vase sitting on a plate," said Richard.

"It's like sex," said Jerry. "If it doesn't stay up, you're in trouble."

Behind the lighthouse were a pair of push jacks, long extending arms, one cylinder that slides out of the other like the actuator on a storm door. Hydraulic pistons pushed the bright-yellow beams the lighthouse rested on, and it slid along the rails, which had been greased with nothing more than Ivory soap.

This push moved so slowly that Len decided to try to give the spectators a visual reference. He grabbed an orange cone and put it on the rail. The lighthouse moved forward, pushing it—and the cone slid, barely, still too slow to see. Len had another idea. He wedged the cone against the lighthouse platform. He found a scrap of wood and balanced it against the tip of the cone. The rail, the cone, and the wood made a delicate triangle. As the lighthouse moved forward, it pushed on one corner, the cone pushed the wood—and the wood fell, with a minor clack. Len set it again. A hundred and sixty years of history had led to this: clack. Len gave up.

The jacks pushed, telescoping until they'd extended sixty-five inches, as far as they go. When they got there, Jerry turned off the truck, and his team reset: Tucked the extending cylinders back inside the push jacks. Moved them up the rails. Bolted them into new positions.

The unified jacking machine was restarted and the pushing continued. It was slow going, mundane, even—and entirely necessary.

Suddenly, Len came back. He had surveying equipment with him, and he worked with the movers to shoot each rail.

"You know, when you say 'the future,' that's a very big word."

T.M. Detwiler

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

What happened?

"As the weight was coming over the beam, it was dropping on one side, so we were starting to notice a list to the structure."

How'd he notice?

"I have kind of a trained eye for when things are out of plumb, and even though it's tapered, I mean, it's a little bit of an optical illusion—but I could sense it. Actually, as I was driving down the road, I looked back and I said, 'Wait a second. That doesn't look right.' "

In his rearview mirror? And he was right?

"We were about a half-inch low on one side."

Len sounded like he was talking about changing a tire on the side of the road. But then someone came over to hand him something. He looked down. "Oh! Hey! All right!" A flat shiny oval.

Two days later the lighthouse reached the end of its railway. The work wasn't over, but the sexy part was done. With the light suspended over the concrete pad, International Chimney built up masonry supports, flush against its granite underside. The jacks were released, and the lighthouse's weight shifted onto this new foundation. From there, the move process would be reversed: steel removed. Foundation reconstructed. Trough refilled.

When the kids from Chilmark were visiting, Len told them about the beginning and the ending of the move process. "The first thing we did is we took all the grass and all the little shrubs, all the trees and everything, and we plucked them out of the ground," he said. "And we put them across the street to save them, so that after we move them we can put everything back, so that when you come back up here after it's all moved, it'll look just like it always did."

So it will. On Memorial Day this year—one Memorial Day late, thanks to that rough winter—the lighthouse will open to the public for the summer season. The vegetation will be pristine but familiar, as Len promised. And there will be grace notes: A ring of granite from the old keeper's house will mark the lighthouse's old foundation. But one day—relatively soon, if this was all worth it—those markers will fall into the sea. The island will age. The schoolkids from Chilmark will get older, take Len and Richard's place. The people who moved the light will be long gone, and those who remember seeing it happen—their memories will fade. It will be hard to discern that the lighthouse moved at all. The structure will be what it has always been: A red-brick, candle-topped chimney in a field of green, sentinel over cliffs, white-red beacon washing over the people of this island, who never really see their home getting smaller every year.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Popular Mechanics participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.